It is often said among people with an entrepreneurial mindset that the greatest time to start pursuing your projects and dreams is now. The second best time is as soon as possible. Unofficially, the third time is as a student or being in your 20s for the lucrative position of relatively lots of freedom and a relative lack of duties and liabilities.

This way, one has an excellent possibility of developing products and services – and hopefully, failing a lot and failing fast – with an ability to bounce back quickly and not having a lot to lose.

As a young person in their 20s, the possible limits are the ones that we place on ourselves – you might feel discouraged attending events and gatherings alone without knowing people previously. But what happens if everything goes well? What if you end up with close friends or a possible business partner?

This is the personal case with Tampere Entrepreneurship Society. Tampere Entrepreneurship Society (or Tre.ES for short) is a community for young people whose mission is to encourage inspired people to take action by providing meaningful opportunities for self-development and giving responsibility with organising events, projects and networking opportunities. The society operates in two languages, English and Finnish, and gives young people the brilliant opportunity to get introduced to the start-up ecosystem and entrepreneurial mindset through a low threshold.

As a member of an international team SYNTRE, we firstly attended a couple of events with the entire team. We were also in contact through hosting international visitors – a half of SYNTRE has at some point been a part of Proakatemia’s International Relations Team or had international visitors, who we took to Tampere’s Startup House Platform6. During the end of the second year, we had an internal joke among the team that we could run the introduction speech to both P6 and Tre.ES by heart since we had heard it so many times.

Jokes aside, the society and the startup house have always left a strong positive impression on us.
The events and initiatives have been informative and of high-quality, which have encouraged us to stay in contact and receive information them on a frequent basis. What started out as introduction has led our teammates to participate in many more possibilities – through Platform6, we have had contact with the Red Brick Accelerator, which saw two of our project ideas developed and through Tampere ES, our team has received useful tools through social entrepreneurship hackathon Unfold and a web3 hackathon BRiDG3.

Being a part of such communities and attending events equips students with necessary practical knowledge, tools and skills that have an essential impact on our lives (Sutevski). Proakatemia’s Entrepreneurship and Team Leadership is a very practical diploma programme, which has immense value for the team entrepreneurs – however, the case is vastly different from other programmes and on the academic level as a whole, where students obtain primarily theoretical knowledge and material. This is important to note and remind again and again, since bringing these two groups of people together through collaboration and networking has the potential to complement our entrepreneurial skills, which can in turn reinforce projects and bring us to scalable companies faster than anything.

In addition to this, communities such as Tampere ES and Platform6 are excellent in their honesty and trust. One can get exclusive access to receive knowledge and become inspired by previous ventures and experiences shared, which is boosted by being open and sharing their stories with others.

By sharing these experiences and stories, one builds and also contributes to a strong community.

For me, lasting memories were made on the two latest excursions organised by Tampere ES of which you can read more about in my other essays. In short, the excursions were eye-opening and inspiring through enriched content provided at the initiatives. Additional value was also brought through the simple experience of being in a new environment, where you could get acquainted with the people interested in the topic and through discussions, be introduced to various viewpoints on different matters, which also developed my views on topics such as entrepreneurship, startup ecosystems and entrepreneurial mindset.

Something that Tampere ES has really excelled at is bringing students together across years and programmes – this way, you can meet young people from different backgrounds such as data systems, engineering, developers, marketers etc that share the same interest in entrepreneurship and want to contribute to different styles of work and projects.

Tampere ES’s next event is a 24 hour BRiDG3 Tech Hackathon, which will take place 8.-9.12.2023. Sign up here: https://link.tamperees.com/NpbZ . You can also find their community Telegram channel and Instagram through this link.

Other useful links to check out are Business Tampere’s Business Services, https://businesstampere.com/entrepreneurs/business-services/starting-a-business/

HUBS’s entrepreneurial unit for students across Tampere Universities, https://hubs.fi/en/frontpage/

Community of Business and Technology Students ( Tampereen Tradenomiopiskelijat ry), https://www.ttory.fi/en

Junior Chamber International’s Finnish unit, which is an international training organization that develops leadership skills, social responsibility, entrepreneurship and internationality for young adults under the age of 40.:  https://tnkk.fi/

Sources:
Article. Sutevski, D. “Why Startup Communities are Important for Young Entrepreneurs.” Entrepreneurship in a Box. https://www.entrepreneurshipinabox.com/18000/why-startup-communities-are-important-for-young-entrepreneurs/

Official website for Tampere Entrepreneurship Society, https://tamperees.com/

Official website for Platform6, https://platform6.fi/